


The Mortifying Ordeal

by Denois



Series: Tumblr Fics and Prompt Fills [38]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: First Kiss, Fluff, Getting Together, M/M, Prompt Fill, Soulmate AU, except technically cannon compliant, one man's trash is another man's soulbond, pre 4.8 anyway
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-19
Updated: 2020-09-19
Packaged: 2021-03-07 16:34:40
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,310
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26550718
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Denois/pseuds/Denois
Summary: It was an urban legend, an old wives tale, a joke. Soulmates didn’t exist. It was a fairytale, a myth, a romantic dream for children and romantic fools.Nursey wasn’t a child.He was, however, a romantic fool.
Relationships: Derek "Nursey" Nurse/William "Dex" Poindexter
Series: Tumblr Fics and Prompt Fills [38]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1693858
Comments: 6
Kudos: 161





	The Mortifying Ordeal

**Author's Note:**

> For [Pretty-Meris](https://pretty-meris.tumblr.com/) who sent me a lovely prompt when I asked for a nudge to get writing:  
> Random ask to encourage writing! Umm Derek writes fragments of poetry on scraps of paper and throws seat any he doesn't like. One day he's digging through Dex's desk to borrow an eraser and finds all of the throwaway fragments. Dex kept all of them😳😳😳
> 
> Please check out her blog. She's one of my top 3 favorite NurseyDex artists.

It was an urban legend, an old wives tale, a joke. Soulmates didn’t exist. It was a fairytale, a myth, a romantic dream for children and romantic fools. 

Nursey wasn’t a child. 

He was, however, a romantic fool. 

He didn’t do it all the time. It was already absurd enough, enough of a long shot. He’d actually spent time looking into the legends around soulmates, searching for first person accounts in historical records, gleaning details that didn’t always make it to the popular retellings in nursery rhymes and schools. 

Nursey was pretty sure that he was doing it correctly. But doing it correctly wasn’t enough. It had to be something of personal but not monetary value. It had to be something unique. And he had to be thinking of his soulmate while he did it.

That was the kicker. That was why so few found their soulmates using the method that it was discounted as a hoax. What were the odds, for centuries, millennia, that people would meet their soulmate and want that person to be their soulmate and try the method to see and have their soulmate want them back? People didn’t even leave the town they were born in very much until the last hundred years or so. Especially not unless they were trying to settle the whole family some place new.

Maybe more than one person had the potential to be one’s soulmate though. Maybe it was just a matter of mismatch and no time for romantic frivolity. 

Of course now, people traveled and met new people all the time. But there were just so many people. So very many people. To think of the exact right one while doing the ritual... the odds weren’t in favor of people finding their soulmate. Especially if they didn’t know about all the rules.

He was fairly certain most people didn’t. He’d been quite young the first time he remembered seeing his sister try the ritual with a group of friends during a sleepover. They’d scrawled the names of the boys they liked onto bits of paper and then fed them carefully into the fire in the den, watching the paper curl up and turn to ash. It hadn’t worked, of course. But his sister and a rotation of friends tried it off and on for a few more years before they’d finally given it up as false and moved on to more interesting urban legends like Bloody Mary. 

His sister was happily married now, and he didn’t think she’d appreciate it if he told her how she’d been doing it wrong all those years ago. She’d probably just call him a lovable idiot and gullible to boot.

Maybe she was right. 

After all, for over a year and half, nearly two years, he’d been trying the same thing, thinking of the same person, and seeing no result. But still.

He looked at the scrap of paper in his hands. 

There were two lines of poetry on it. Sometimes there were more, but this one was just two lines. Two lines of himself. They weren’t bad work. They weren’t written for a school assignment. On their own, they wouldn’t win him any prizes or get him published. But they were two lines that captured how he’d felt at a particular time. They were a memory. They were his. 

He thought of Dex and fed the paper carefully into a candle on his desk. 

Dex didn’t like open flames in the Haus. It was made of wood and poorly maintained and there’d already been that one incident over the summer. There wasn’t really anything Dex could do to stop him though. And he must have known, because he didn’t try. 

Oh sure, he made comments about being careful and he’d made Nursey a lovely fireproof holder and catch basin for any errant wax. But he never tried to stop Nursey from lighting his candle whenever he wanted. 

Nursey watched the smoke wisp up from the paper, the ink seeming to glow ever so slightly as the paper curled around on itself. He dropped it onto the lily pad candle holder and thought of Dex.

He thought of Dex. 

Hands rough from hockey and work but gentle and deft when dealing with people and food, and really anything delicate. 

He thought of Dex.

Constantly peeling clementines and passing segments over to Nursey as they walked across campus.

He thought of Dex.

A takeaway into a no-look pass that would get Nursey a shot on goal.

He thought of Dex.

Shrugging out of his jacket and then his flannel because he’d seen Nursey and Chowder shiver. Then shoving his hands into his pockets and claiming he was fine and they should use them for the day. 

He thought of Dex. He thought of Dex. _He thought of Dex_.

The fire was out, the poem fragment was gone, not even ash remained.

He very nearly convinced himself that there wasn’t a reason why he’d decided to burn another slip that night. It was just a normal Wednesday. Typically not even a day that they’d try to cook at the Haus instead of ordering in or getting food from the d-hall. 

But it wasn’t really a normal Wednesday, was it? It was Dex’s 20th birthday. There didn’t seem to be any indication in the sources that he’d gathered that there was an age limit on the process. Upper or lower. There wasn’t some magical power that a birthday could lend to the ritual. 

But it felt right. So, he’d done it.

There was no way to tell if it worked. That was the beauty of the full ritual. It could only be completed by the other person. It was fully, 100%, consensual. 

Nursey tried not to think about the fact that meant Dex might have just chosen not to complete the bond. 

It was much safer to think about the poetry he was supposed to be writing for class. Homework. Homework was great. Homework was safe.

It’s just that he’d messed up and he hated scratching out over words. It’s why he always wrote his first drafts for homework in pencil. (The slips of paper he burned, he refused to correct at all. His soulmate offering was a piece of himself, flaws and all.)

More irritating than the mistake was that his pencil eraser had worn down so far that it wasn’t erasing and would be more likely to tear the paper and smudge the graphite than to actually do any erasing. He wasn’t sure where his erasers were, but he was pretty sure that Dex had some in his desk.

Dex always seemed to have whatever Nursey needed. Dex always seemed prepared.

So, Nursey sat in Dex’s desk chair and started opening drawers. He wasn’t snooping. He absolutely had not been snooping. He didn’t glance in the spirals stacked neatly in the bottom right drawer. He didn’t rifle through Dex’s belongings in the bottom left drawer. But he still hadn’t found an eraser and he was beginning to think that a little bit of rifling might be in order. Just a tiny peek through Dex’s backpack, perhaps. Only enough to find an eraser. 

But then he opened the top left drawer. It was nearly empty. Well, it held one item. A cheap photo album. The kind with the sticky pages that clear film lay across to hold the pictures. 

He shouldn’t have looked. A photo album wasn’t going to hide an eraser tucked inside. But it seemed he’d been wrong about the one item, because there was something just peeking out from under the edge of the album. A scrap of paper. 

He picked up the album, then the scrap of paper. Like he’d thought, it was his handwriting on the paper. It held his words. Him. 

Opening the album revealed page after page of the scraps carefully lined up, taped into place in some spots where the glue wasn’t holding well enough. All the bits of poetry that Nursey had burned over the last year and a half. 

Dex had received them. Dex had kept them in an album.

The door to their room opened and Nursey looked up to meet Dex’s gaze. 

Dex, for his part, was staring at the album in Nursey’s hands and visibly trying not to blush. “Go on. Chirp me. Just because they’re trash to you doesn’t mean I can’t like them and think they’re worth keeping.”

Nursey had to swallow twice before he could talk. “Trash?”

“Yeah. I should have realized before we moved in together that you wouldn’t be any better about leaving your scraps of trash around in my stuff. But whatever. Like I said. You could’ve done a better job throwing them away if you cared that much about no one seeing.” 

“You kept my snippets of poems.” He looked back down at the pages, his eyes catching on ones with illegible words here and there, misspellings, awkward meter. “You kept them all. I didn’t throw them out.”

“I didn’t steal them, if that’s what you’re claiming. You threw them out. You don’t let stuff you care about fall into someone else’s stuff unless you don’t think of it as more than trash. Well. One man’s trash, another man’s treasure. Blah blah.” Dex’s jaw was getting tighter. 

Nursey almost wanted to laugh. It would be the wrong move. It would absolutely ruin everything and still he very nearly did. “I didn’t throw them out, Dexy. I burned them.” 

Dex’s eyes narrowed and then slowly slid over to Nursey’s desk where the candle and holder still sat, the wax not fully hardened. “Why would you do that?”

Dex paused and looked even more quizzical. “You couldn’t have burned them or I wouldn’t have found them.

Nursey wanted, he very much wanted, to watch Dex when he said the next part. But he couldn’t. He looked down at the poems again; allowed his fingers to trace over the lines. “You know the urban legend about soulmates?”

A very inelegant snort was the reply. Of course Dex did. Everyone did.

“All the versions I’ve heard passed around are wrong. But I looked up old primary sources. And I figured it out. You have to burn a part of yourself. Something unique, of personal but not monetary value. You have to sacrifice a part of you to the flame. You have to be thinking of your soulmate, that’s an important bit. Intentionally baring yourself to a specific person.” 

He paused and swallowed hard again to give himself time to breathe. He cleared his throat. He continued, “If you bare yourself in this way and the person you are thinking of is your soulmate, they will find the item amongst their own.”

Dex was quiet. Unnaturally quiet, but Dex was often unnaturally quiet when faced with something he wasn’t sure was in earnest. 

Nursey risked a glance over. 

“You’re trying to tell me that we’re soulmates? You and me? The prince and the kitchen boy?” He snorted again. “If you don’t want me to keep your poems, then fine. Take them. And be more careful about throwing them out instead of tossing them in my stuff from now on.” 

Nursey stood up and looked at him directly. “I’ve been burning poems while thinking of you for over a year and a half and apparently you’ve been finding them all. So yeah, we’re soulmates. If you have a problem with that, I’ll move out. If you want to keep it platonic, that’s chill. I can’t make you accept the bond anyway. But on the record, I hope you do. I hope you kiss me and I hope we’re bonded and I hope that I can actually leave little bits of poetry for you to find for the rest of our lives.”

The only response that his outpouring got for several long moments was Dex blinking rapidly. “You want me to kiss you?”

“Ch’yeah. That would be mad chill.” 

Dex rolled his eyes, which was definitely Nursey’s goal in slipping back into his Chill TM vernacular. “You want me to kiss you.”

“Practically begging at this point, really.”

“You aren’t just chirping me.” 

“I’m the one announcing that I love you for all and sundry to hear.”

Dex had stepped close by this point. Closing the gap one slow step at a time while they talked. His hands, those firm, rough, gentle hands reached up to cradle Nursey’s jaw and he leaned in close, pausing only inches away. “You’re an idiot.”

And then Dex kissed him. And then Dex kissed him. And then Dex kissed him yet again.

And he kissed Dex back. 

He could kiss Dex forever. He never wanted to stop. A thrill ran through him and he felt...known. And it should have been scary, but it was beautiful. Because he was known, fully, truly known, and he was accepted. In spite of it all. Because of it all. He was known and he was accepted and he was loved. He could feel it then, in Dex’s soft movements of lip against lip. 

Dex loved him as much as he loved Dex. They were soulmates.

Finally, Dex pulled back and rested their foreheads together with a soft smile. “You’re still an idiot.”

“I have it on good authority that I’m a lovable one, though.” 

“Ayuh. Definitely that. Just seems like if you’d _told_ me what the papers meant, you wouldn’t have had to burn things for a year and a half. Pyromaniac.”

“Well, you could have mentioned finding them.”

“Sure. Just casually bring up that I found your trash in my stuff. That wouldn’t be weird.” 

“Will, stop talking and kiss me some more.”

There was a slight movement as Dex huffed a laugh and smiled that small, crooked smile again. And then he did as Nursey’d asked.


End file.
